People who are good at reading have different brains: study
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I was hyperlexic, and I always found it very bizarre when people said they had a voice in their heads while they were reading (subvocalization.) I think I read so much as a very small child that I was exposed to much more written than spoken language, and I never needed subvocalization (or left it behind at some point.) After learning a second language with very different pronunciation rules, I realized that I was not only subvocalizing in that language, but was also now subvocalizing while reading English.
It struck me when I was reading a book on the operations of the House of Commons, and I realized I was reading "clerk" as "clark." The word "clerk" is spelled identically and has exactly the same meaning in both American and British English, but I was distinguishing them because I was reading in a UK context.
I actually wrote about it yesterday; using a database metaphor, I think I turned the natural primary key of the visual appearance of words into a composite key that now included the sound in order to distinguish between the meanings of very similar Romance language words from their English counterparts. I had to read in an accent. I'm considering blaming how impossibly hard it was for me to pick up a second language on the disability of not previously subvocalizing.
The article you link to seems to show a correlation, but surely a more likely explanation is that the same factors cause both early reading ability and autism.
There’s really all the difference in the world if you can sit still and focus on a good engaging long-form work. I think most folk are losing the discipline to do that, as we all communicate in brief spurts of async messaging and anything published for mass consumption is written at a 4th grade level
I try to read novels in chapter length segments. It’s hard to avoid to urge to context switch or get distracted
i do not think this is discipline so much as inclination. I never had to discipline myself to read a book I enjoyed (whether fiction or non-fiction). Some books grip me so much it takes discipline to but the down.
What this seems to show is that long form reading has significant effects on your brain, developing the ability to read long form. I am not clear on whether they have shown which way the causality runs: maybe having a brain adapted to long form reading just makes you more likely to do it. It could even run both ways?
even paper books suck compared to kindle, which saves space, access to billions of books in a comfortable way to read. (can't read brother karamazov laying in bed)
I guess it depends on intent. Reading a fiction epub in an app is different from reading HN threads with 500+ comments.
It's a hypnotic state. How else can you imagine a world while your eyes rapidly scanning pages of words?
I was a voracious reader of fiction as a child, and in a way immersed myself in books too. But, I never really considered whether other readers are having an accompanying visual experience that isn't just pages and pages of typesetting. I also went through a phase of reading a lot of poetry, and was a bit of an outsider because my experience of it is also as text on a page, not some reconstructed audio performance.
On the reading speed topic, I don't have any performance metrics for myself but it seemed I was pretty fast and comprehensive compared to peers. I definitely lean towards the gestalt parser side of things, taking in phrases or larger blocks of text rather than scanning one word at a time.
As an adult, I've noticed that this ability seems to be more content dependent than I originally understood. If I encounter truly unfamiliar writing styles, or even unfamiliar typesetting conventions, I can find myself getting "disoriented" and having to go back. It's like my visual parsing and lexical parsing pipeline tosses up some kind of "parity" error and I have to go back and try again.
I think this reading stall also happens more often with non-fiction, and wonder if that's because I mostly assimilated fiction idioms. So my brain has more trouble predicting and assembling texts that follow other structures. But also, the non-fiction I encounter is more often written by international authors with English as a second language. So that may also shift grammar and prose conventions...
I read words all day, everyday on a computer. I have read hundreds if not thousands of non-fiction books but for fiction in the last 30 years, have only read 1984.
It is like a club that I am not dressed for to gain admission. I am just not able to get into the story. 1984 was different though because I think I was half in the story, half comparing things to actual reality.
It really sucks because works like The Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace are just completely impossible for me and I know how much I am missing out.
All the great classic science fiction...tried many times, failed many times, know how much I am missing out.
Another idea could be poetry. I particularly love romantic poetry (referring to the era and style here, not the genre) which is on the longer side. So, maybe W.B.Yeats[Second Coming], John Keats[Endymion, Hyperion], P.B. Shelly[Hymn to Intellectual Beauty].
These formats are in stark contrast to a novel in that their "plots" are simpler to digest, and these are often shorter, focusing much more on how the reader experiences themes and emotions.
Building on the idea, I think movies probably stimulate the same sense, except compared to books they do most of the imagining for you.
Some say audio books are a cop out, but they can really carry you through a story you wouldn't be able to finish otherwise. And as the saying goes, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.
But really there are no roolz. It comes down to doing what you enjoy. Try to find fiction that plays to your interests and lean into it, see where it goes.
That said it's often just entertainment / mental junk food, not some great virtuous act like it's frequently portrayed by libraries / kids shows / lit majors.
The result of all this reading is I have, for lack of a better way to describe this to the HN audience, I have a gargantuan context. I can hold a huge amount of information in my head at once, and work with it dynamically. When I imagine a software issue, I see it as parallel implementations in my mind with variations between them, and as I evaluate the variations those that are not possible or no functionally better than the others disappear from the grid in my mind, and when there is only one left I start coding.
However, I find explaining my software development process to others impossible. They say what I'm doing is not possible, or they say I'm lying. I think all this reading gave me an over developed sense of secondary consideration insight. I simply see further the implications of things, of how their combinations are going to affect one another. But as hard as I try, I cannot explain these insights in a convincing manner. It's like being aware a tower is going to collapse, I can tell people how it will happen, and they just deny it, and then it collapses. Sometimes I then get blamed for not insisting against their denials.
Due to all this: I've become a student of effective communications. I'm continually trying to figure out how to explain to those that cannot see these combinations and implications of how in the future this thing is going to fail.
My brother and I both read around 900 wpm. My children only read at a normal adult speed, but both love to read. If I had a way to have passed on my reading speed, I would have. But I have no idea how to do so. And no idea how my reading speed is possible.
I've met only one person outside of my family with similar reading speed to my own.
Anyways, I do slow down dramatically when it's technical. I'm learning then, and limited by my learning speed.
When I'm reading fiction, I forget that I'm reading, and don't even know what speed I'm reading. I'm completely in the flow and the story is playing out in my head.
Do you also find that this happens with different types of fiction, or are they all basically the same?
Personally, if I'm reading someone like Toni Morrison or Marquez, I find that I like to slow down and savor what's going on. It's like ready poetry. If it's something I can read fast, I tend to find it's not something I'm drawn to spending the time with.
There’s no pleasure in speed reading through literature. It’s like a gourmet meal - you don’t enjoy the food if you wolf it down in 10 minutes.
But if I'm just reading an average programming book, then basically yes. 700+ WPM is comfortable, and I don't try to measure exactly how much + it is.
It's a skill that can be learned, but likely you self-taught and simply don't remember learning it.
Speed reading is explicitly trading off speed and comprehension. It takes advantage of the fact that we need to see a lot less of the text to pull out certain ideas than we think we do.
I'm simply reading. In full.
What does your comprehension test at? It's not uncommon for speed readers to test at high comprehension with your reading rate.
Reading implies digestion, if you're not digesting you're not reading 'in full'.
Just not necessarily while my eyes are occupied with the book.
It sounds like you claim to read fast, but then have to take extra time to digest, so if we add your digesting time to your reading time and count that total as reading time period, it's not actually that fast at all.
But try to read a text like a complex SCOTUS majority opinion, or one of the Great Books, at anything close to that speed — good luck! Even trained and very experienced appellate attorneys can study such texts for hours, days, weeks, and still find important intricacies that require not just perception, but ingestion and digestion.
As an exercise, one might grab any text and have one's computer read it aloud at 900 WPM. If one were to glean a single sentence, let alone the important bits, let alone all of it, I'd be shocked.
It is how I got through those middle Wheel of Time books.
But not only.
Back in January, Dave Mills died. I told my boss I'd not heard of him so I didn't think an obit was called for.
The mourning on HN over the weekend persuaded me otherwise.
So, on Monday morning, I read everything I could find about him -- I estimate at least 2000 pages worth and maybe twice that -- and then I wrote this:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/23/david_mills_obit/
It gave me a bit of a headache but I can still tear through large amounts of text, retain the info, summarise it, and then if I don't want or need it let it go.
During my graduate coursework I sometimes read 100-200 pages of technical material in a day while cramming for an exam, and was able to retain it for a day or two. I'd believe it if some people exist who could comprehend and retain all of that long-term. Alas, 'tis not I.
If 25% of people have it then, practically, Dyslexia means you are in the bottom 25% of readers, as much as the Dyslexia industrial complex wants to see it as taxonic and not dimensional. (Sure they say it has two subtypes and sure, maybe there are two reasons that make most bad readers bad readers, there are probably more reasons that are more obscure and too hard to pin down)
Personally I think there are a lot of white collar people who are devastated to have a child who is a poor reader who won't follow in their footsteps (college professors, journalists, people in ethic groups where people will think you're a loser if you're a cop or pro football player, etc.) Labeling it as a disease makes it easier for people in that situation to live with it.
Isn't this just how all diseases and indeed all things work? We're the ones who come up with these simple categorizations and labels to describe reality which is vastly more complex. The terms are necessarily underspecified and the boundaries between categories are necessarily fuzzy. This is true even within some medical community that attempts to have more precise definitions of "disease"/"disorder"/"disability"/etc. and it's all the more true for colloquial usage of these terms. But yes, these terms do end up just meaning "any condition that is not normal that causes problems for the person experiencing it."
Anything above that reading speed I've started just allocating to bullshitters, or generally techniques which come back to "not reading" rather than "reading".
That is to say people who choose techniques to try to speed themselves up through strategies like "skimming" (that is to say, not reading parts of the text to try to game metrics) or "extracting key points" (that is to say not reading parts of the text to try to game metrics) or their comprehension drops beyond 100% (that is to say not reading to try to game metrics).
And that's assuming you're not just dealing with the actual frauds trying to talk themselves up in a penis-measuring contest or sell something.
So yeah, I'm in the anything above 400-600 wpm is in the bullshitters club. And technical or difficult text is of course lower and can't be sped up.
No inherent offence intended to "speed readers"... Ok, maybe a little...
Do you have any evidence of this beyond the fact that if you sped up your own reading you would lose comprehension? The person reading at 150wpm could make the same case against you.
There are quite a number of studies on this, but I'll reference a blog that does all the referencing for me [0] since their experience and thirst for knowledge that led them to later be an advocate against - rather than an advocate for - speed reading is basically a 1:1 match of my own.
500-600 WPM is the upper limits, 99.99% of people claiming otherwise are bullshitting, I always leave that 0.01% because some people are literally just built different and are truly one-of-a-kind (or one-of-maybe-a-dozen people on Earth). Anyone claiming such speeds is going to be under a lot of scrutiny the same way I'd be skeptical of anyone else claiming to be in the top 0.01% of anything. If someone tells me they're a Top 10 Challenger ranked League of Legends player I'm not just going to take their word for it without some solid evidence.
[0] https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2015/01/19/speed-reading-re...
All that I have to say about it, is that in a place like Hacker News, you do encounter the top 0.01% on a fairly regular basis. Particularly among those who were here early on. Being too skeptical of it when you see it doesn't sound like that good an idea.
I mean seriously. Why would I lie? And why would I risk the fake reputation on this account on a lie about something stupid, when I have friends who know me here?
Ignoring five minute Reddit or hacker News messages where people say "oh I'm so fast at reading" once you actually have to put them to the test: i.e. oh cool you're a fast reader: so here's a thing we've both not seen but are required to read and we'll discuss and analyse them in the morning. And you can judge how fast they are based on their understanding of the text and how far they've gotten compared to you.
Eventually you start to realise that there's a mysterious absence of observations to the right of what appears imo to be an almost biological barrier.
Then you start to look into their history: well I presume you've read a lot? And you try to talk to them about things... And they're generally not that well-read.
Then you correlate it with other high-performers: PhDs, professors, learned people, people who read all the time and have a history of reading. And you see that these best readers who read a lot also tend to read at a maximum speed of about 300-600 wpm with any comprehension.
So you come to balance these two hypothesese: there's speed readers out there, but they're generally not well read people and don't have a history of reading and they can't discuss much and they don't tend to turn up to discuss things when there's actual reading involved... But they can read really fast I swear!
And you compare them to the people who professionally read, read all the time, are verifiable strong readers... And you clock them between 300-600 wpm.
Beyond the whole "proving a negative" what's a rational person supposed to conclude?
/This is making some minor possible exceptions for people like Kim peek, but aside from having never met him, of such people exist, my understanding is there's also genuine philosophical questions as to whether what those people are doing can neurologically be considered the same act of reading as what the average human being is doing in terms of whether they can then discuss the themes, contents and implications of what they read.
Edit: and this is in context of people like me LOVE reading, so of course we've looked into methods and communities that propose they can increase reading speed, make people read faster, and are filled with fast readers
My wife reads at roughly double that speed. She’s the only person I have ever met who reads significantly faster than I do. Met a few who are 10% or maybe 20% faster than I am. But she’s in an entirely separate category, and yes, that is with 100% comprehension, not skimming.
When we were dating, and I first saw her do it, I just said oh, you read really fast. She said, so you don’t think I’m faking it? No, I said, you’re just the first person I’ve ever met who is noticeably faster than I am, but it’s obviously real.
Then I asked the question: what color is the number 5? She stared at me for a second before giving her reply (I don’t remember). “How did you know?” Because I’d read about synesthesia and a qualitatively different form of pattern recognition seemed the most obvious conclusion. Someone might be a little faster than me with basic reading skills, but I’ve been around enough fast readers to know that I’m pretty damned fast, and that those who are faster are usually just a bit faster. Not double.
The other person I met with the same speed I discovered by sending her an article, rereading it because I was bored while waiting for her to read, then finding that I was done around when she began commenting on it - having finished at about the same time.
You don't have to believe me. As far as I'm concerned, it's a party trick. But a trick that means that I prefer the written word over other forms of entertainment.
I had long since come to the conclusion that "speed reading" is a hoax and just another name for "skimming". They are not fooling anybody but their own ego.
The technique of Reading varies widely based on content and our own interest in it.
For example, i have spent hours upon hours reading/re-reading the Sherlock Holmes canon dozens of times because i find the language phrasing/stories/deductions highly appealing and hence want to savour/understand every word of it. On the other hand even though i love Charles Dickens' novels i don't spend as much time on it and skim through large parts which are not appealing to me. The result is that i can literally write essays in my sleep on Sherlock Holmes but can't do it for Oliver Twist/Great Expectations/etc. Thus the meaning of the word "read" is not the same for both.
I have a huge personal library consisting of a large number of "hard copies" and an even larger one in "soft copies" and love skimming/reading them. Skimming to note the larger main points and coming back to Read them if and when i feel like it.
Hi there. I am the walking talking proof you're wrong.
But I don't know how I can prove it to you.
I read this: https://www.amazon.com/Victory-Island-Tale-Penguin-Classics/...
In 2-2.5 hours.
I read this:
https://www.amazon.com/Mission-Gravity-Mesklinite-Book-Maste...
In half an hour, and that was for pleasure.
Sure I could bro down those words in a straight beginning-to-end readthrough and get a sense of what's going on. But I find that going back over the past few paragraphs is rewarding, as subtle turns of phrase reveal details I hadn't noticed.
You could probably be trained to comprehend text electronically read to you at 900 wpm. Blind people using screenreaders, for instance, train themselves to understand text read aloud very fast.
Summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AXNLUFeplI "A PTA delegation from Earth visit another planet to investigate their educational methods in order to figure out how to improve the school system back home on Earth. But the lessons learned, and the conclusions drawn, are rather… odd and disturbing."
From the story: https://uncabob.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-primary-education-o...
“How rapidly do you read?” Miss Hanks asked a young girl.
“One hundred and twenty words a minute,” the girl said.
“On Earth some of the girl students your age have learned to read at the rate of five hundred words a minute,” Miss Hanks said proudly.
“When I began disciplined reading, I was reading at the rate of four thousands words a minute,” the girl said. “They had quite a time correcting me of it. I had to take remedial reading, and my parents were ashamed of me. Now I’ve learned to read almost slow enough.”
“I don’t understand,” said Miss Hanks.
...
“What is this business about slow reading?” Miss Hanks asked. “I don’t understand it at all.”
“Only the other day there was a child in the third grade who persisted in rapid reading.” Philoxenus said. “He was given an object lesson. He was given a book of medium difficulty, and he read it rapidly. Then he had to put the book away and repeat what he had read. Do you know that in the first thirty pages he missed four words? Midway in the book there was a whole statement which he had understood wrongly, and there were hundreds of pages that he got word-perfect only with difficulty. If he was so unsure on material that he had just read, think how imperfectly he would have recalled it forty years later.”
“You mean that the Camiroi children learn to recall everything that they read?”
“The Camiroi children and adults will recall for life every detail they have ever seen, read or heard. We on Camiroi are only a little more intelligent than you on Earth. We cannot afford to waste time in forgetting or reviewing, or in pursuing anything of a shallowness that lends itself to scanning.”
She goes to great lengths to show how non-sexist the society is according to then feminist theory. Then, just accidentally, slips in gender divides that should not exist in her society.
Given that I had just read some of that feminist literature, I found it quite jarring.
The most jarring for me was some of the childhood scenes.
Difficult?! That's a favourite novel of mine. I've read it 3 or 4 times. What is difficult about it? It's short, as well as beautiful. Only 250 pages.
Mind you, I don't agree with a lot of Kant. But that's another story.
I'm sure some of it is ADHD or something but to me, reading is about ideas and I can't wait until the end of a book or even the end of a long article without playing around with them. Especially if it's a topic I'm interested in.
Even if speed readers can fully comprehend and retain what they've sped over, I can't help but feel that they're probably missing something.
I first learned my reading speed by accident after I read Clan of the Cave Bear in a single sitting. Immediately afterwards I could not summarize it, though I could recognize any passage in the book. The next day, I could summarize it.
I describe it as feeling like I have a pipeline. I'm able to fill my brain. Digestion is indeed slower.
As a kid, at once 2 month period, I only had access to a library for a few hours on Sunday afternoons and no other time. I could not remove books.
So I read as much as I could in that time window.
5, 6, 7 books in 2 or 3 hours.
Then I'd spend the next 6 days going through them in my head and enjoying them.
Alas, the selection was quite lacking. So although I voraciously consumed dozens of "Hardy Boys" novels, the subsequent days were filled with irritating thoughts about how stupid they were.... perhaps the inverse of your experience.
Nevertheless, while I was trapped there, it seemed much better than nothing!
I still read books, and to me it seems obvious that most of the "experience" of reading plays out in the background in the days and weeks that follow (unfortunately, even if the book has little to offer — although as an adult I'm free to recogize that and move on to another book).
P.S. Halfway through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future and it's a good one! Much better than reading about Chet Morton's old jalopy breaking down again just as the villains are escaping on bicycles... ;-P
Imagine if someone said they could eat super fast because they could shove food in their mouth fast, but still took a long time to chew and swallow.
Same thing.
I can answer comprehension questions and get a good score. For example I got a perfect score on the verbal section of the GRE when I took it in the early 1990s, and this is the speed that I did the reading comprehension tests. I can read whole books, and come away able to find any passage after reading just a few paragraphs. For all intents and purposes, it's read.
I can't debug code at this speed though. Doesn't matter how fast I can read, I can't think for myself at the same speed.
There are many. I just did this one, the first hit on Google:
https://swiftread.com/reading-speed-test
It said:
« Reading speed: 861 Words per Minute (WPM)
Comprehension: 100% of questions answered correctly
How your reading speed compares
Slow 150 WPM Average 250 WPM Fast 400 WPM Speed reader 600 WPM
You can read pretty fast! Remember that reading fast is only valuable if you're able to maintain good enough comprehension for your goals. »
I took my time and paid attention in order to be able to give dates and things.
I can go considerably faster. I read about 1000wpm or so for work, a bit slower if I am taking time for pleasure, and when I was a teenager, about 2-3 times faster than that when under pressure.
For instance, I read Joseph Conrad's _Victory_ -- 432 dense pages -- in 2 hours for homework, then wrote an essay on it and went to bed. I got a B+. :-)
Shorter lighter SF novels I read in half an hour, back then.
I took that test:
Current Test Results
Reading speed: 1560 Words per Minute (WPM)
Comprehension: 100% of questions answered correctly
Most of my few seconds spent "reading" was actually spent deciding if I even had to read it at all. I correctly concluded that the test was garbage, and then skipped to the questions, and answered the 4(!) questions using only basic common sense.
No, I am not trolling. If you have a better test, I can try it, no problem.
My reading speed is limited by how fast I can move my eyes, if I use one of those apps that just flashes the words in the same spot my reading speed at least increases by at least 4x
I've seen advice about continuous eye movement for fast reading. That is BS in my experience.
I used to be a fast reader.
I tried improving my Spanish by reading Spanish books and I would subvocalize the words.
After that I lost my fast reading skill in English.
I notice that my error rate (reading words that aren't there) goes way up if I push myself to go faster. If I'm reading something that is easy to guess at then it might feel like I'm blazing through it with good retention, but if the words aren't what I expect then it ends up being quite counter-productive
Speed reading works well on texts that are highly redundant with internal "error correction".
Try reading a YA novel quickly (the content motivates you to go faster :) ) and then try to read a physics paper at the same speed.
(I seem to have a good size memory buffer for this which no doubt has to do with enabling the speed reading. I remember in typing class classmates were amazed that the way I transcribed assigned text was to read a half a page or more and type it all out verbatim before going back for another chunk. Until they pointed it out I didn't think that was anything special.)
I will admit that at 900 WPM I wasn't getting 100% of the material (albeit enough to get 90% on the comprehension test - which is less than 90% of the source material, just enough source material to reconstruct 90% of the gist). I was really trying to see how fast I could go, since it was computer graded and I could gamify it. (I did get a different text to read and questions to answer about it each time; I wasn't re-reading the same text.) Through this same exercise I learned my comfortable reading speed was 200 - 300 WPM and speed reading without loss of comprehension (just requiring effortful concentration and/or impatience) was around 500.
As an adult I'm certain my reading speed is NOT that fast anymore, and I often find myself re-reading text I just read.
I'm limited to something like 40-45 WPM.
And the 900 wpm minute is simply about what I find comfortable for a story where I want to know what happens next.
That's similar to a tactic speed readers: looking at spaces between words instead of the words themselves, which allows your brain to pull in multiple words at once. There's a pile of approaches and not all are useful, but that one is. Another I've found is quieting my inner voice.
Without doing any practice or any other speed reading methods, just doing those two things boosted my wpm to 500+ at 100% comprehension when I was younger. I was a good reader to begin with but not a particularly fast one. I stuck with those methods because they're effortless and I didn't want to lose comprehension by pushing faster.
And importantly most of what I read is fiction, and a faster speed feels as though it would ruin the feeling of stories that are more ponderous. I prefer the speed of the thoughts on the page to feel like they're real time with the characters thinking them.
I know someone who had undiagnosed vision problems when young which harmed the ability to read fast/fluently.
I suspect that vision is pretty critical. To read fast you have to be able to visually capture quickly, chunk things together and feed them to further stages of the comprehension pipeline.
I suspect poor vision, poor lighting and contrast, bad fonts, flickering displays, distractions from other senses all slow you down. I also think there might be an age window to learning reading fluency that could be missed.
I read fairly fast (haven't tested it in a while) but I learned reading books, which have good contrast, a large high-resolution font and reflective lighting. I wonder if this makes my visual pipeline attuned to reading different than new readers who have learned on glowy screens, with small pixelated fonts, and competing with other non-reading distractions.
Might be interesting to give your kids physical books or reflective e-ink/e-paper readers to read in a well-lit environment and see if it helps.
That's a great speed. I'll never reach because I have to read some paragraphs several times before I understand the article. Some times using pen a paper...
Anyway, you can still improve you speed with the same level of understanding by asking chatgpt for summary.
For example I'm currently following around 50 actively updating stories on Royal Roads.
I'm surprised by the number of adults I've worked with who had graduate degrees and yet could not read a paragraph out loud on the spot and sound natural. I found out most of the reason I was having so much trouble communicating with them was because almost all our communication was in writing, and they couldn't read fluently.
It's hard for me to imagine completing, like, 5th grade without being able to read well, so it's a testament to their fierce determination that they'd been working around that challenge at such high levels!
As someone who reads aloud a lot, I contend that this is a subtly different process than simply reading quietly on your own, and something that must be practiced. You need to set up a "reading system" and a "speaking system" and have them operate independently, like a drummer doing a polyrhythm or like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time. You also have to throttle your "reading system" to a slower pace than is natural to fluent readers reading silently. They say that poorer readers "sub-vocalize" which limits their reading speed -- well, fully vocalizing does too. All this to say that you can't conclude someone is a poor reader just because they can't read aloud naturally; nor even can you conclude that someone good at reading aloud is a particularly great silent reader.
When I started reading out loud to my son, decades later, I finally learned how to "really" read at the same time as reading out loud. I also learned how to read ahead to see who was going to talk next so that I could do the voices properly. (Discworld books are great for this, because his writing really helps you know how to pronounce the dialog.)
It's hard to shift gears like that. I can read vastly faster than I can speak so it can be difficult to coordinate the two on the spot. Most reading people do is silent reading, so this shouldn't necessarily be that surprising.
When I would hop on a call with these people and ask them to summarize what they thought my message said, they weren't close on that either, so I'm pretty sure these people actually were not reading fluently.
Unless I missed it, there isn’t much mentioned on plasticity in the original paper.
I know a guy that plays chess around the 2000 level, but cannot read. I have a cousin who can memorize a deck of cards, in any order, in just a few minutes. Everybody has different talents, but who gets to decide which brains are worth understanding?
We should be trying to combine and analyze all of the different ways that different brains have capacity for incredible feats of human accomplishment.
It all boils down to understanding a complex system.
Does precocious reading mean the left anterior part of the temporal lobe and the Heschl's gyrus are already larger/thicker to begin with in some people? Or do they develop rapidly in response to reading as a stimulus?
—Woody Allen
I see words, as if written gliding through my mind as I think my internal thoughts.
My father didn’t believe me, and probably still doesn’t; but it is interesting to me how our brains can be so different as to not even be able to understand another persons easy to define alternative internal experiences.
I also always wondered if we all perceive colours the same or if colours are different to us but we just give them the same words- since colour could, in theory, be completely subjective.
That sounds really annoying, but I would assume that you could transcribe what someone is saying out loud while continuing to listen? I would find that extremely difficult.
In my mind when I’m typing out letters its a little similar to those typing games[0] where you see a word and punch it down letter by letter. In my head it goes bolder when I wrote a letter of a word I’m putting down. This makes it very easy to transcribe documents - an unnecessary skill in the age of OCR. I doubt there is any other advantage of this quirk, other than it seems that spelling seems to be easier for me than others on the internet.
If I had to listen to someone I would have to pause while my brain processed it into text and only then could I continue.
[0]: https://zty.pe/
Your thing seems cool but yeah, I can't imagine it and trying to imagine it is, annoying. You would have made a good lawyer, if you're not one already. The lawyers I know who are world class can both do what you can do + are also just intelligent/smart/fast. Oh I guess maybe you're a SWE? I guess a "10x" SWE is probably doing this too, it's why I never made it in comp sci.
Using text to speech has also helped. No longer do I delay reading long messages from coworkers, or dread reading boring documentation. I just use text to speech. It works really well on Windows (my current work laptop), but unfortunately not so much on Linux (personal laptop) or mobile (too fiddly).
You're not alone there.
I think this is an under-rated benefit of reading. Would you feel like you failed if your mind wandered during a guided meditation? Can reading serve a similar function?
This is one reason why I gave up trying to significantly increase my reading speed. Blazing through a nonfiction book at 700 WPM might make you feel like you've learned a lot, but you probably haven't really digested anything. Do you really want to uncritically ingest a nonfiction book? I've listened to enough episodes of If Books Could Kill (amazing podcast, btw) to no longer have any desire to quickly "absorb knowledge" from a book, with how likely it is that that "knowledge" is flawed in myriad ways. I now think it's much better to go slowly, ponder what you read, take time to let your mind wander (it's connecting the rest of your life to what you've just read), and be critical and questioning of everything you read. If a book isn't worth taking this time on, it's not worth reading.
And for novels or reading for fun, why would you want to rush through it? It's for pleasure: go at whatever speed gives you the most pleasure. It's not a contest.
I was amazed.
The trouble turned out to be it simply got harder and harder for me to read, and so I enjoyed it less, so read less. Getting progressive lenses fixed that.
Earlier this year I went to the opticians (it'd been a few years) and lo and behold I had a prescription for the first time. A very mild one, and I suspect it's the astigmatism that affects reading more, since it makes smaller fonts sort of 'fuzzy' around the edges, even though everything seems perfectly fine at that distance (or any other) without the direct comparison.
From personal experience, I find it much easier to get absorbed reading books like I used to when I'm on a detox from the tyranny of the screen. It doesn't take long at all; a day or two and I start to feel some recovery.
Taking even that much time away feels increasingly difficult... But like going to the gym, you rarely regret it afterwards.
I myself struggle with reading and am left handed. It sort of feels like I'm forcing a muscle instead of using a muscle and strengthening it. I also have poor reading comprehension. I do read a lot but no matter how much more I read my comprehension and reading ability always stays the same.
I also wonder if left-to-right languages are better suited for right handed people. Often my eyes will jump around the text in a way that feels like it'd be easier to read text right-to-left.
I am a natural speedreader -- I never studied it -- and I have read accounts of several other natural speedreaders in this thread and agree with them.
I'm left-handed too.
I doubt there's any correlation, TBH.
If I want to get better at the piano, how many hours of music should I passively listen to before I start practicing the piano? None: start right now.
While I haven't taken a modern SAT test, I'm pretty sure the ~verbal score covers a fair amount of comprehension and ~usage that isn't as easy to cram/prep. Since the GP is setting aside vocabulary prep as a separate phase, I think they're specifically wondering about how to build up those more nebulous skills.
(Is your hypothesis here that just running over a lot of these questions is sufficient to develop reading comprehension at a level necessary to handle novel questions at exam time? Is it that just reading enough of these questions will teach you the comprehension? Is it that these questions aren't a great proxy for comprehension in the first place and hence it's easier to game them than to develop comprehension? Some of these might tick the GP's boxes, but others probably won't.
To get really to the point: one of the GP's concerns is reading speed, and I suspect it's going to be really hard to crack 700 under pressure if you're having trouble even reading all of the questions/answers in the allotted time.)